Saw a Facebook post calling for Eagle Scouts to step up for Democracy, invoking the Scouting oath and values. I'd love to see more such calls leveraging voluntary group membership--especially skills-based. Martial artists have a lot to offer their communities right now, for example.

These left-handed handshakes are even more intense than the right-handed ones.

Lots of things to fix out there but a decent argument that a real fix (if such a thing existed) for what can reasonably be called “elite impunity” would cascade out fixes for like 90 percent of the rest of it

Barely a blip in the news. 🦗from the New York Times editorial and opinion pages. Compare with days of Hunter Biden Hysteria about unprecedented abuse of the pardon power.

Fuck these people. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

electoral politics has cooked many brains bc I cannot believe I'm seeing some folks argue "helping people is only worth it if they vote for you"

Context you rarely hear: global stocks are up about 30% over the past year. U.S. stocks? Around 18%. That means American investors underperformed the world by about 12 percentage points, even while headlines called it a “fantastic year.”

Cats who insist on involving themselves in crochet projects should expect to be used as tensioning devices.

More seriously, as most readers here know I helped draft the CA billionaire tax initiative text and you just can't get out of it by setting up a couple of LLCs in Florida. We have thought about how to block these fake paper moves for 4 years.

If universities were like police departments, faculty would be unfireable.

The bloody ghost of my ancestor Lt. John Bacon, shot dead by a redcoat musket during the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19th, 1775, appeared at the side of my bed last night and said anyone can be American as long as they aren’t English

Dean Martin, born Dino Paul Crocetti, son of Italian immigrant Gaetano Crocetti Frank Sinatra, son of Italian immigrants Antonino Sinatra and Natalina Garavanta Merry Christmas to everyone except Stephen Miller and his enablers and handlers

Seasons greetings.

FalalalaLOL

ICE detain father shopping on Christmas Eve—then steal his family's groceries. Then 3 agents divvy up his paid for food—taking what they want for themselves. "Can I just get the wife's number to call and let her know?" woman asks. "No, guess he should've complied," agent says. Yakima, Washington

Make him famous. The woman lost her baby. #BrendenCunt/Cuni

Trump cares so deeply about Nigerian Christians that last week he banned them from getting any business, tourist, student, or immigrant visas. Merry Christmas!

Our supposedly Christian president has deported Christian families who face persecution, torture and death to Iran multiple times this year and as recently as December 7.

[Trump]: And Tiny Tim….. Nasty, nasty guy. Been very unfair to me.

I'm just going to pretend these are all about the three spirits who didn't let him sleep a wink last night.

A public database of ice, ice agents, DHS, etc. Has now been built and it's entirely outside of the US and US government reach.

I appreciate this clarification from the AP: "The law explicitly prohibits the board of trustees from making the center into a memorial to anyone else, and from putting another person’s name on the building’s exterior." apnews.com/article/kenn...

A small (personal) example of this book’s intellectual dishonesty: My father-in-law is reading In Covid’s Wake, and excitedly told me he found a passage where I’m quoted. The quote in question is me saying the FBI worked to censor speech on social media. Huh? When did I say that?!

The only way I would watch the Kennedy Center Honors is if it were held at Ford's Theatre and John Wilkes Booth were going.

The Kennedy Center re-naming poll has me wondering: Has anyone polled the approval/disapproval for Trump's comments in Rob Reiner?

I don't think free speech on campus ought to mean that a young coddled bigot gets to use their ignorance to casually destroy the career of a knowledgeable trans person on a random Wednesday

Christopher Anderson, who photographed Trump's team for Vanity Fair, says that, at the end of the shoot, Stephen Miller said to him, "'You know, you have a lot of power in the discretion you use to be kind to people.' And I looked at him and I said, 'You know, you do, too.'"

picturing Saint Nicholas of Myra fresh off punching out Arius and coming after ICE

if bari weiss had tried to do 9/11 there'd be three towers now

The full spiked 60 Minutes CECOT package, clean & subtitled. 1/5

Seriously: wasn't she even watching her own promos?

Canadian TV network bravely airs dissidents’ report on U.S. abuses after political commissar orders its suppression

Found the actual men in women's bathrooms assaulting women.

A definitional element of extremism is that harming an out-group is inseparable from the success or survival of the in-group. For extremists, such harm becomes an intrinsic need. They come to believe that denying them the right to harm out-groups is the same thing as denying them the right to exist.

Google Gemini Pro: please generate a map of the western united states showing cities of over 250K population

This is why I've hesitated to throw away my dad's observing slides from the 69s and 70s. He was studying the atmospheres of Mars and Venus, but the spectra of course captured Earth's atmosphere too. Ground-based astronomy recorded a LOT of Earth info!

NEW: Organ tuners have been leaving temperature and humidity records in little-known books for decades. 🎹 They reveal how temperatures inside churches have changed over time due to climate change and increased heating. A new scoop for The Reengineer! www.thereengineer.pro/p/church-org...

This is Bari Weiss in stonewalling, chin-out, "I won't let the haters get to me" mode. Whether she gets away with it will be determined by whether Sharyn Alfonsi's colleagues at 60 Minutes and CBS News decide to fight back. Pelley, Stahl, Cooper--this decision goes on everyone's permanent record.

CBS paid the president of the United States millions in bribe money and now they censor news reports so it does not annoy him. I don’t know how much plainer we can put this.

My mother was an RN for five decades. Anyone who doesn't help vote these shitbags out in 2026 should expect to be personally haunted by her, nightly, forever.

This is fine. /s #atxwx #atx #austin

The entire american "free speech" panic was about elites being criticized, which is why anyone who ever took it seriously should be ignored forever

The name "Popular Science" doesn't mean we shift our coverage depending on public opinion. It means we cover relevant subjects that are rigorously researched, reliable, and grounded in reality. And trans lives are grounded in reality. We see y'all. No matter what. www.popsci.com/science/tran...

UPDATE: in point of fact there is not an innocent explanation for this.

Bari Weiss is just so fucking brave yall she just cares about having a solid debate

The funniest thing I have read in the Lizza Diaries so far is that he didn't know who Gavin de Becker was, and considers him "terrifying" and "mysterious" instead of a best-selling author who has been on Oprah.

This 60 Minutes fan page indicates the spiked segment was going to feature interviews with former CECOT detainees recounting "abuse." It said this "reflects 60 Minutes’ long-standing approach to accountability journalism." The video it linked to is gone. 60minutestonight.com/inside-cecot...

Certainly there are plenty of worse things Vance should apologize for, ahead of his whiteness.